Sir Henry Cecil, who died last week, said that his relationship with Frankel,
his champion horse, was key to his coping with the chemotherapy in his last
months

Sir Henry Cecil’s beautifully tailored suit hung limply from his long, gaunt body, and his voice was reduced to a rasping whisper — cruel manifestations of the cancer that we both knew would kill him. Last Tuesday, it did, and I reflected on the privilege of being granted what I’m pretty sure was the final newspaper interview with the man considered even by rival trainers to have been a genius in the art and science of getting the best out of thoroughbred racehorses.

He was so much more than that, though, as last week’s lavish obituaries made clear. He was an enigma, a proper bon vivant who enjoyed nothing more than tending his beloved roses at his Newmarket home, Warren Place. Yet paradoxically, he was as shy as he was charismatic. He was a genuine toff, able to trace his lineage on his Scottish mother’s side back to the clan chiefs who supported Robert the Bruce, while through his father he was a direct descendant of the Cecils who were power-brokers in Tudor England. Yet he was as happy in the company of stable hands as of sheikhs.

It was this marvellous way with people that shed light on his marvellous way with horses. He would not talk down to even his lowliest employee, and would listen to anything they had to say. So it was with his equine workers. “I actually believe that horses talk to you,” he told me. “If you study horses, then through their expressions and mannerisms, they tell you whether or not they’re right [for racing].”

This wasn’t glib anthropomorphism; indeed Cecil would have claimed he could not even spell the word. He was relentlessly but never tiresomely self-deprecating, rarely missing a chance to undermine himself, and telling me, as he told every interviewer, how he was the only boy at his Eton prep school to fail to get into Eton. “I’m qualified to do nothing,” he said, draped over an armchair in his baronial study, puffing on an electronic cigarette. “Not even be a porter at a railway station. I’ve just been very lucky.”

When we met last autumn, Cecil was contemplating the valedictory race of his extraordinary colt, Frankel. It was poignant but also rather glorious that his once-in-a-lifetime horse should have arrived so close to the end of his life. And, as he freely admitted, Frankel had kept him going through the ravages of chemotherapy. It wasn’t that there was nothing left to live for when Frankel retired to stud last October, unbeaten in 14 races, but Cecil knew that it signalled the end of the last great symbiosis between him and a racehorse.

“He has a presence,” said Cecil. “He’s not a nonentity. It’s rather like people. Throughout my training career I’ve come across so many people I’d never otherwise have met, whether it be princes or successful businessmen, and most have an ambience about them, a lot of presence and panache.

“Good horses have the same thing. Those people don’t have to tell you what they’ve done, but they’ve done it all. Prince Khalid [Frankel’s owner] is very gentle, modest, interesting. And Daniel Wildenstein, the art collector, was the same. Lovely manners.”

Cecil might have been talking about himself, but instead, as ever, cast himself in the role of impressionable dimwit. He was, of course, anything but, and his own languid manner concealed a core of absolute steel.

The obituarists made much of his Lazarus-like emergence from the catastrophic phase in his life when David, his beloved twin, died, his second marriage disintegrated, he was banned from driving for five years, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and several high-profile owners lost faith. Yet the majesty of that comeback can hardly be overstated.

His travails compounded the huge affection in which he was held by the racing public, but in 2005, he trained a mere 12 winners all season, an unimaginable humiliation for a man who in 1987, his most prolific year, had delivered 180. In 2005 he was not even in the top 50 of the trainers’ table that he had dominated so many times, but in 2011 he was back in third place, fully restored as a genuine racing force.

Later on the day when I last saw Cecil, Lord Grimthorpe, Prince Khalid’s racing manager, used a football analogy to describe it. “Henry’s gone from the Premier League to practically the Conference and back,” he told me. “It is one of the great sporting achievements.”

More than that, it was a great human achievement, and it spoke of phenomenal willpower as well as that almost mystical affinity with his equine protégés. Nobody would wish for Cecil’s life to have been curtailed any sooner than the three-score-years-and-ten he was allotted, but in a way it was sad that he lived to see the disgrace of fellow Newmarket trainer Mahmood Al Zarooni, banned for feeding steroids to horses. That was the antithesis of the way Cecil did business.

He was not, however, some kind of latter-day St Francis of Assisi. Two broken marriages hint at the complexity of a man with as many flaws and foibles as virtues. He took unexpected, unreasonable umbrage at Brough Scott’s superb recent biography of him, with which he had fully co-operated yet which he chose to disown. The launch party for the book — simply titled Henry Cecil: Trainer of Genius — was scheduled for last Wednesday. It would have appealed to Cecil’s irrepressibly impish sense of humour that his death forced a postponement.

During our meeting, his third wife, Jane, kept poking her head round the door, cross with him for talking to me for so long. Theirs was a manifestly happy union, and he assured me that he could not have survived for as long as he did without her unremitting care and support. It is Lady Jane Cecil who will now be billed as the trainer of the nine Warren Place horses entered for Royal Ascot next week.

Whatever the weather, Cecil’s death will cast a gloomy cloud over the event, which begins on Tuesday. For he bestrode Royal Ascot like the sporting colossus that he was, over the years saddling 75 winners, more than any other trainer. It is a remarkable tally, but records get broken, and someone might yet eclipse it.

It is entirely safe to say, though, that there will never be another trainer like Sir Henry Cecil. It is impossible to imagine anyone with his patrician background, a background in which horses barely figured until his widowed mother married the royal trainer Sir Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, embracing the sport of kings with a fierce work ethic combined with natural flair.

Perhaps the ultimate paradox about this legend of the turf is that he was so utterly a man for all seasons and yet completely a man of his time.

He was born in Aberdeen at the height of the Second World War, just five days after confirmation that his father, Henry Kerr Auchmuty Cecil, had been killed in action in Africa. Then, three months later, on the night the Luftwaffe launched its most devastating attack of the war on Aberdeen, a huge incendiary bomb landed outside the Cecils’ front door, but failed to explode. Scott relates the event at the start of chapter one of his biography, but it works as an epilogue, too: the miracle is that he survived at all.